An H.264 Advanced Video Coder (i.e., H.264) standard has introduced state-of-the-art and high compression efficiency coding techniques. High coding performance is made possible by implementing many tools, such as flexible block sizes, motion compensation, sub-pixel level motion compensation, bidirectional motion estimation, de-blocking filtering, flexible transforms and efficient entropy coding. The tools have created a greater demand for processor computational power during the video coding.
The processor computational power consumed while encoding average or steady state content is not always sufficient to handle stressful and complex content, such as high motion video or change of video scenery. However, designing a processor system to handle worst case scenarios is not economical or even possible due to high variability of the video content and limitations of the processor technology. The complex video content is addressed in conventional approaches by skipping the processing for some frames, reducing the frame rate and implementing region-of-interest coding techniques.
It would be desirable to implement performance control in video encoding.